Best Laid Plans

Hello all, we meet again. In my last post I said I’d be writing about technology here in the future rather than my ongoing health saga. As the title of this post suggests though, “the best laid plans of mice and men often go awry”. Here’s some info on the quote. I was recently informed by The Christie that they are postponing my operation with less than a week to go. I was due to be admitted on Jan 13th and now that’s been put back to Feb 10th, with the actual operation to take place on Feb 11th.

It’s only a slip of 4 weeks I know and it’s not the end of the world but it is frustrating when I just want to get this done so I can recover, get back to work and hopefully get on with my life. Every extra week adds up and it can start to feel like time is dragging on but I’ll get there.

So what’s the reason for the delay? An emergency case they need to deal with first apparently. With such a rare and specialised surgical procedure I suppose there was always a danger of delay. In some ways I should be glad that my case isn’t deemed as critically urgent and they feel I can wait 4 more weeks. There must be other patients in a much worse condition. Every cloud has a silver lining and all that.

Only 500 of these operations have been done at The Christie in the 10 years since it was first pioneered, so that illustrates how rare it is. Right now I can’t say I feel fantastic but I’m not in pain and I am managing to do some things to keep busy. I guess it’s a case of hurry up and wait. So I have to be a patient patient.

The Google Pixel C

However, in other (nicer) news I just got a Google Pixel C last week and I’m actually writing this on it right now. It’s the new flagship 10.2 inch Android tablet from Google and the first to be 100% designed by them, right down to the hardware. The Pixel team developed it alongside their fancy but rather expensive Chromebooks. It has Android 6.0.1 installed at the moment and is effectively a Nexus device in all but name. That means it will be first to receive new versions of Android and Android N is due in a few months. I expect it will be largely tailored to this device and I expect good things. I needed a new tablet but I also wanted to get something that could replace most of the functions I’d normally do with the laptop. In the interests of fairness I looked at the Microsoft Surface, Apple iPad Pro and a variety of convertible laptops, including the ASUS transformer series. I decided this was by far the best option right now. It’s something of a personal experiment to see whether a good tablet like this (with a Bluetooth mouse and keyboard) can really cut it as a laptop replacement. I am also helped in this project by the work I’ve done on my server beefing up hardware and configuring KVM soI can use a remote desktop. I’ll write up some proper thoughts on all this to share with you very soon. At least I have a little more time to do that now before I head off to the hospital.

4 comments on “Best Laid Plans”

ok — third attempt to post a reply 😉 for some reason it keeps complaining that I am too late for the captcha and when I get back my post is no longer available so need to retype. Ok — enough of whining…

Hold on there Dan! Such news indeed suck, but hopefully it is all for the best (doctors meanwhile get even more expertise and will come to your case even better rested 😉 )

Meanwhile back to whining: would you be kind to fix up timing for Complicated man in RHR Ep.151 — should be 8:21, not 0:00. Thanks in advance

Thanks for fixing up the timing. I have pushed updated annex repo. At home was using it on my xbmc media center — very lovely to see and be able to navigate the entire list of all episodes and tracks 😉

Dan, I am a long time listener to both LO and FLOSS weakly, recently picked up GNR, and miss you from all three.
I really wish the operation gets done this time, and that you’ll have a quick recovery!
All the best 🙂